Hopelessness, depression a way of life for Gazans

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Dozens of families still live in tents amid collapsed buildings and rusting pipes. With construction materials barred, a few are building mud-brick homes.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Dozens of families still live in tents amid collapsed buildings and rusting pipes. With construction materials barred, a few are building mud-brick homes.

Everything but food and medicine has to be smuggled through desert tunnels from Egypt. Among the most sought items is an addictive pain reliever used to fight depression.

Four months after Israel waged a war here to stop Hamas rocket fire, and two years after Hamas took full control of this coastal strip, Gaza is like an island adrift. Squeezed by an Israeli and Egyptian boycott and by Islamist rulers, the 1.5 million people here are cut off from any productivity or hope.

"Right after the war, everybody came -- journalists, foreign governments and charities promising to help," said Hashem Dardona, 47, who is unemployed. "Now, nobody comes."

But with the Obama administration pressing Israel to allow in reconstruction materials, and with attention increasingly focused on internal Palestinian divisions, Gaza soon will be back at the center of peace negotiations.

For many Israelis, Gaza is a symbol of all that is wrong with Palestinian sovereignty, which they view increasingly as an opportunity for anti-Israeli forces, notably Iran, to get within rocket range. Unless a way can be found to tie Gaza back to the West Bank politically and geographically while mitigating Israeli fears, a Palestinian state seems further away than ever.

Gaza is crowded and poor, but it is better off than nearly all of Africa and some parts of Asia. There is no acute malnutrition, and infant-mortality rates compare with those in Egypt and Jordan, according to Mahmoud Daher of the World Health Organization.

Although Israel and Egypt have shut the borders for the past three years in an effort to squeeze Hamas, Israel rations aid daily, allowing in about 100 trucks of food and medicine. Military officers in Tel Aviv count the calories to avoid a disaster. And the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees runs schools and medical clinics that are clean and efficient.

But there are many levels of deprivation just short of catastrophe. Apart from basic commerce and farming, there basically is no functioning economy. Education has declined terribly, and medical care is declining.

There are tens of thousands of educated, ambitious people, among them teachers, engineers, translators and business managers, who have nothing to do but grow frustrated. They cannot practice their professions and they cannot leave. They collect welfare and smoke in cafes. A U.N. survey shows a spike in domestic violence.

Many people say they have started to take an opiate-like painkiller that increases sexual desire and a sense

of control.

Hamas has recently warned of imprisonment for those who traffic in and take the drug. Yet, the pills arrive, along with clothing, furniture and cigarettes, through the hundreds of tunnels punched into the desert at the southern border town

of Rafah by entrepreneurs who pay Hamas a tax on

the goods.

Similar tunnels also serve as conduits for arms. Israel periodically bombs those in hopes of weakening Hamas, which says it will never recognize Israel and will reserve the right to use violence against it until it leaves all the land it won in the 1967 war. After that, there would be a 10-year truce while the next steps were contemplated, although the Hamas charter calls for the destruction of Israel in any borders.

The Israeli aim is to keep Gaza at subsistence and offer a contrast with the West Bank, which in theory benefits from foreign aid and economic and political development. The plan has not gone well, however, partly because the West Bank under Israeli occupation remains no one's idea of paradise and partly because Hamas seems more in control here every year, with cleaner streets and lower crime.

"Hamas is learning from its mistakes and getting stronger and stronger," said Sharhabeed al-Zaeem, a prominent lawyer.

"The people of Gaza are depressed, and depressed people turn to myth and fantasy, meaning religion and drugs," said Jawdat Khoudary, a building contractor. "This kind of a prison feeds extremism. Let people see out to see a different version of reality."